


When It Alternation Finds

by snowshus



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, M/M, Trick or Treat: Trick, the effects of time travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 07:11:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21070949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/pseuds/snowshus
Summary: It's all in the details





	When It Alternation Finds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alchemise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/gifts).

In his years outside of the time stream Mick has learned that time is more like rubber than the cement the time masters would like to imagine it as. It can be stretched and twisted and bent but it will always come back to that form. It wants to happen, sure, but in a sort of broad strokes way, and it doesn’t really give a shit about the detail work. Len will always leave him and Mick will always be Chronos but time doesn't care if that happen in 2046 or an empty forest or the 1950s. It all ends in the same place. The overall shape of time is unchanged. The minutiae that make up people's lives aren’t important enough for time to care about as long those big strokes happen. Those little details are the are the sort of changes, that makes more changes. They compile and all the changes that add together aren't big enough to break time but they are big enough to change the important things.

Len presses a finger to his younger self’s heart and says, “Don’t ever let anyone hurt you not here, and especially not here.” The change ripples out from his finger. The timeline where Mick could say he had held all of Len’s heart shivers and disappears. An old dull wanting ache fills his chest where the last bit of Len’s trust used to be. Their partnership rocks with the ripples in the timeline. They’re such small changes, empty air where once a hand had been offered, silence instead of confessions. 

A man in a futuristic suit that shoots lasers saves Mick from an assassin with a leather fetish when he is fifteen. His brain is still young, growing in wild ways down unpredictable electrical currents. It lights up a new path. Someone puts a baby, tiny and precious and vulnerable, in his arms. Someone says the fire wasn’t his fault. 

The timeline ripples around him, around all these new thoughts forming, solidifying in his malleable brain. _I am worth saving, I am trustworthy, I can be forgiven_. The memory of them will be gone in a flash of light but the path is already made. The anger and hate and guilt are still there and they try to burn away at everything, to convince him he nothing but a monster. This time they can’t burn it all. There’s still the whisper, _I am worth it, worth saving, worth trusting, worth forgiving_. The effects ripple out through his life, a softness remains that had been burned away last time. Where once there had been empty air and silences he offers his hands and his confessions. 

Len carries a ring with him, twists it on and off his finger, a memento from their first job together: the first time Mick had left the money to save Len. The actual job was a total cluster fuck but he’d managed to steal Len’s heart so he considers it a net win. In everyone’s memory Len has always carried that ring. It’s only in Gideon’s memory banks that the truth hides.

Two timelines ago he would have never have taken Ray’s place at the Oculus. But across the universe in a house hidden in time he is still fifteen and being trusted with someone’s life despite what he had done and it’s changing him. 

One timeline ago Len would have left him to die, his heart frozen by a stranger in his living room and a father who could not be altered. But Mick was able to slip through that ice in this one. 

Now Len’s ring rests against Mick’s chest. It’s always cool, never taking on the warmth of Mick’s skin. Mick knows the Oculus being destroyed is a big brush stroke, no amount of twisting and bending time will stop it. Someone has to die. Who dies though, that’s the detail work. It's a change so small it disappears in the larger picture. And so Mick keeps poking the timeline, causing a ripple here or there. Eventually one of them is bound to carry Len back to him. Someone else can die for them next time.


End file.
